an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

April 02, 2010

New Celerra VSA (5.6.48.701) and Updated “SRM4 in a box” guide

UPDATE – SEPT 16th, 2010 – Nick has done it again, and there is now an Celerra VSA UBER v3 (based on DART 6.0) – find more here. Keeping this post up for comments, and also for some of the other content, but STOP using the older VSA.

UPDATE – May 22nd, 2010: Nick Weaver has produced an incredible optimization of the Celerra VSA – the “UBER Edition”. It makes it installable in less than 2minutes, runs faster on less hardware, and makes adding additional storage is a snap.

I **highly** recommend it. This means that the “HOWTO video series that walked through the more complex parts of Celerra VSA setup are no longer needed, though the SRM setup guide for the VSAs is handy (just simply skip all the stuff in the doc that dealt with the setup/customization heavy lifting). Download location for the UBER edition is shown in the post below.

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Ok – the latest Celerra VSA is available, along with the new SRM4 end-to-end guide!

Note: make sure that if you’re using VMware vSphere 4 (or Workstation 6.5 and later), and have a platform that supports Intel VT or AMD-V to enable hardware offload – this has a massive effect on Celerra VSA performance and responsiveness. Details here.

What’s new:

New OVA packaging, configuration for latest VMware tools and pvSCSI config – note this makes it vSphere 4 only (the VMware Workstation versions are also provided)

New dedupe/compression code (faster, better, stronger)

New VM-level hardware-accelerated fast clone (snapshot) and full clone (clone)

Support for the new vSphere NFS Plugin shown here. That link also has instructions on where to get it.

Better performance with less CPU, memory constrained configs

Fixed issue in the 5.6.47.11 version that made eth2 not work right.

And much, much more!!!

Here’s another kick-a$$ demo of the VM-level compress in action on a thinly provisioned VM…

Wow. a few seconds, ~50% storage reclaim (on top of effects of thin provisioning). If only this function was more universal across EMC nudge, nudge wink wink :-) Your mileage may vary, but hey, try it with the VSA :-)

I’ve tested it using the OVF/OVA import in vSphere 4, and added half a terabyte of storage to it – works like a charm.

Also, there’s a new coffee-table book for all Celerra/vSphere use cases, the Celerra Techbook for vSphere, which you can find here

Read on for more……

Ok – some caveats are the same:

This is not supported in production - you cannot use this for anything beyond testing and development without violating the License Agreement. BTW - as usual - no conspiracy, it's not a matter of "extracting" $$ from people by forcing them to buy HW. iSCSI you can do free (note how all freely available simulated arrays are iSCSI only), but any device that licenses CIFS from Microsoft (like the Celerra and Netapp FAS filers so they can integrate like Windows Servers can) as opposed to using Samba can't be given out without "non-production" caveats.

You can run it on VMware Workstation 6.5 and later, but I personally recommend ESX – it’s a bit faster, and you can get some hefty horsepower ridiculously cheaply now – homebrew instructions here

You need 1GB of RAM (3GB is better if replicating) for the VM, 40GB for storage (less – about 3GB - if you deploy it “thin”, and more storage if you want to add more)

This is functionally equivalent to a Celerra running DART 5.6.48.701– so you can use it with EMC’s Replication Manager for VMware integrated snapshots, use the vCenter plugins, configure VMware SRM, etc. You can also add more physical storage so you can really play.

UPDATE: while the links to the “official” Celerra VSAs are still shown below – download the “UBER edition” – much simpler setup, and has been squeezed down to run super-fast with less hardware.

Once you’ve downloaded, we’ve tested against the old HOWTO videos, and they’re still good – so follow along, and if you want a single document that captures all the steps, HOWTO 401 (updated as of April 2nd, 2010, and includes SRM4) does that.

UPDATE: All the steps of 101, 201, 301 (and those steps in the full end-to-end document) are all automated with the Celerra VSA UBER edition – simpler, faster, easier – you have to love it!

Comments

Hello, i think that something is broken on the provided celerra vsa ova file(5.6.48.701).
When i'm trying to deploy it on my vsphere4 installation i get the following error: Line 48: unsupported hardware device 'virtualscsi'

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Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC. This is my blog, it is not an EMC blog.